Symptoms of Fall

 It's been such a hot, dry summer, that I'm hearing more often people looking forward to fall.  I'm included.  When we look for something, we tend to see it.  The Dogwood (above) won't undergo major color change for another couple of months, but when one or two leaves turn bright red ahead of time, it tends to stir anticipation.

 I've been looking at tiny, immature acorns all summer, but it seems like just during the past couple of weeks, lots of them have become full size and look like they're ready to give birth to new trees.  I now the squirrels are already busy in my neighborhood.

 Toward middle to late summer, the ponds at the college hatchery tend to get pretty clogged with filamentous algae, and probably some cyanobacteria as well.  That tends to be good for the non-native Bullfrogs, but not so good for the trout.  I love to photograph frogs and to watch them catch dragonflies, so I was a bit disappointed this morning when I saw hatchery workers dragging the algae out of the ponds.  Good for the trout though.

The White Fir, being an evergreen, is not necessarily a sign of Fall.  But I am in the midst of splitting my winter supply of firewood, and the young firs near my woodpile are an endless source of fascination for me.  When I drive Plumas County roads, I tend to take the pines and firs for granted.  But, the close-up views from my woodpile cause me to appreciate the symmetry of the attachment of needles to branchlets, and branchlets to branches.  Then at each node on the trunk there are from four to seven branches shooting horizontally like radii of a circle.  I find myself staring at the White Firs every time I take a break.  My mind wanders back to my youth when school began after Labor Day and August was still summer.  When I worked in the wheat country of eastern Colorado, it was common for the opening day of school to be postponed for weeks so the high school students could help with the harvest.  I still can't get used to California where Fall Semester begins in mid-August.
And, of course, every bug and flowering plant has its own idea of when summer ends and fall begins.
The whole concept of seasons is just a human construct, of course, and our story books and social conditioning favor the northern European paradigm.  But every region of the country, not to mention country of the world, has its own cycles of climate patterns.  Between now and, say Thanksgiving, there will be many traditional markers of the change of seasons.  But every since the invention of the light bulb, it seems people pay less and less attention to the sky and to the growth cycles of native plants and animals.  I remember when a few years ago I lived by Lake Tahoe and fall was a kind of holding pattern between summer and winter, the two seasons that brought in lots of money from tourists.  Fall, as such, didn't seem to be appreciated.  I confess, I grew to like fall best because of the lack of tourists!